


Conflict

by damselindisguise



Series: Countdown [2]
Category: Dead Space (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, M/M, Planet Destruction, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Timers, Space Husbands, Space Opera, Weapons of Mass Destruction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-11
Packaged: 2019-07-29 02:36:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16254947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damselindisguise/pseuds/damselindisguise
Summary: The Brethren Moons reign supreme. Earth is lost. There is no hope.All the same, Isaac and Carver will continue to fight the masses to prevent the utter extinction of humanity at the hands of the twisted monstrosities that have come to consume the galaxy.





	1. Dreamscape

Lost, trapped, in the darkness, Carver finds himself walking towards a light, and for a moment considers if he might be dead, after all. He's always heard that you see a light when you die, after all, and that if you walk into it, you'll find yourself in some kind of assorted afterlife, depending on exactly what view of theology one subscribes to. Unfortunately, he's never been all that good at believing in anything, so he's not sure he's going to find anything on the other side of the light, if he is, in fact, dead. He thinks it's more likely these are the final fits of his brain's electric impulses, if he is fact dying right now.

He heads towards the light anyway, nothing else left to do at this point, and finds, unlike every other dream he's ever had, he has control over his body here. He feels light and vaguely numb, still, feelings only slight pressure against his skin, invariably so, but when he scans himself, he's intact. His clock is still full of zeroes, not that he expected anything different, even if he might have been afraid of it, should he have had time to really stop and think.

Carver steps through the light, covering his eyes with one raised arm as it shines, blinding, around him; and then, with another few steps, like he's walking through a snowstorm on Tau Volantis, he's emerged from its depths, and, looking back, finds he's walked through a kind of wall of it that stretches into the sky. When he turns forward again, he's back on Uxor, staring at the burning remains of the ship, crashed into the residential sector of the research facility that he had been guarding. Marker Shroud 4 is smoldering in the distance, and it gives a pulse, the air around it rippling as an unnatural horn blares its sound, piercing to his ears. He covers them and doubles over until the pulse ends.

Straightening up, the soldier resolves to head into the facility- maybe in this dreamscape, he'll find something different than he did that day. Instead of his dead family waiting to try and devour him and transform him into a twisted monster like they had become, perhaps he'll find them cowering in the ruins, waiting on him to come and find them, to set them free of their fear and save them from the whole goddamn mess.

The halls spark with stray electricity, wires that hang free of the walls spitting white-hot into the air. A few fires rage here and there, where rubble has piled too near to these exposed power sources, or where survivors might have set possessions ablaze of their own accord to try and stave off their doom at the hands of the Necromorphs. 

Carver wonders for a moment what Isaac is experiencing, in his final moments, because he's fairly sure that's what's happening right now, given the Brethren Moon rising before the Terra Nova before this sudden fever dream. It had probably torn their minds apart in seconds, and they're both dead on the floor right now, the soldier's hands still reaching for Isaac as he cringes away from the psychic influence of the massive Necromorph they had come under attack from. 

He'd like to think that Isaac is somewhere calm, perhaps with Ellie on the New Horizons Lunar Colony in that tiny apartment, the sun shining through the Earthrise's windows and lighting them up gold. Something in him wants to rotate the image, wants to see what it looks like when Langford isn't there, when it's just Clarke, the sun lighting his dark hair and turning the grey that had crept in at its edges into bright, untarnished gold, like he'd never gone through all the suffering that Carver knows he has. For a moment, the dream around him seems to almost shiver, and he can imagine Isaac, wrapped in the sheet up to his diaphragm, scratching his beard, gazing at the sun. He's turning his head to look at the soldier when the dream solidifies again into Uxor.

Shaking off the distracting image of Isaac for the moment, and resolving to instead carry out the objective he's been dealt by his mind, he continues on down the hallway, ducking under a fallen strut that had formerly held up the ceiling, until being collapsed by the falling ship after the electromagnetic pulse that had plunged everything into darkness. He blinks against it, now, the sparking lines left behind, and raises his gun, manifesting as abruptly into his hands as the dreamscape did into his mind after walking through the light. There's a flashlight mounted on it, and he shines it down the hallway, counting doors to find his own.

Through a window ahead, he can see the Marker Shroud; burning and broken open, it's crumbling. The pieces that fall look like burning tissue paper as they spiral slowly towards the ground and then explode into dust and embers at their impact. More and more of the monolith is becoming visible, and as it does the pulses grow closer together. The glyphs along its even layers glow, intensity increasing with each pulse, until they leave afterimages in his eyes when he spares a second look at the massive object. Shivering, he looks away, and tries to blink them from his eyes, failing. They just stay there, glowing against the dark each time he blinks, and burning in the shadows when he keeps his eyes open. They make themselves as inescapable as the realization that he's not the one creating this dreamscape after all.

The Brethren Moon is in his head.

~

Isaac forces himself to wake up in the cockpit of the Terra Nova, sitting forward with a gasp and grabbing at the console to jerk the ship's radio offline, cutting off the signal that flows with the screams of the Necromorphs and their victims on the other side. He listens to the quiet, and blocks out the roar of the Brethren Moon's rage that threatens to plunge him back into hallucinations, before turning to find John prone on the floor beside his chair.

"Oh, shit," he says, "John! John, wake up!"

He tosses himself from his seat, scuttling over to the other man and dragging him in close, shaking him by the shoulders in an attempt to jerk him loose of whatever hallucination or otherwise induced vision the Brethren Moon has plunged his soulmate into. 

Isaac is much more experienced in freeing himself than anyone else from the dementia's hold, he knows; that's why it's so hard to figure out how to help someone else when they are plunged fully into it to the point of falling unconscious. He wants desperately to free John from whatever nightmare that has grasped him in its rotted fist, sinking its claws into his mind, but he's not sure how to do so without the soldier's own help- and, as far as he knows, John is not nearly as used to these things as the engineer is.

He keeps shaking him as he tries to think of something.

~

After taking a short break to panic with the glyphs shining in his eyes, Marker blaring in his ears, and smoke filling his nose, Carver drags himself back to his feet and vows to see this through, hallucination as a result of Necromorph-borne dementia or not. Maybe, just maybe, if he can complete this objective, he'll be able to find a way out of the dreamscape it's created to trap him inside, presumably whilst trying to use him in some twisted way, be that transforming him into a Necromorph all his own or something else entirely. He thinks of how the Markers had implanted Isaac with the ability to build them- though also to destroy them- and hopes that's not what's happening to him now. He's fine with only being capable of the latter.

He's getting close to his old residence, now, his shoulders sore and feeling like he's bearing a massive weight as he goes, holding his rifle before him with the barrel pointed slightly down so he can take any Necromorphs out at the knees. He hopes the damn Moon isn't going to make him relive the deaths of his family, or, worse, make him kill their grotesque copies again. He's not sure he could take that a second time without breaking- but maybe that's its intention. Maybe, being inside of his head, it knows that, and intends to use it to its own advantage.

Carver adjusts his Bullpup Rifle in his arms and wonders where the hell all the Necromorphs are, anyways. There were many more of them than this when this all really happened; he'd had to fight masses of them in the halls, clumped together in claustrophobic quarters that had left him coated in their slime and gore, stinking of their pus and rot. This time around, there's almost none; only the distance sounds of them, their screams and groans saturating the atmosphere of the research facility's residential sector as he walks along slowly but surely, drawing nearer and nearer to his former apartment's dreamscape version.

Then, just like that, he's home, staring at the door, knocked slightly ajar from its frame from the impact of the fallen ship overhead. Inside, there are shadows, and then gentle blue static flicker of a device trying to turn back on. He knows that one well; Damara had been trying to contact him, trying to call him to find out what had happened, when he was coming to save them, but he hadn't got the call in all the chaos.

It would have been his last chance to talk to her, to see her. His last chance to talk to Dylan, or see him, too. 

He pushes the door open with effort, the corner dragging with an audible grinding against the ground as it goes. He steps in once there's enough room, and shoves it shut with his boot to keep himself from being surprised by any newcomers arriving behind him- namely, the Necromorphs whose voices he can still hear, just muffled, through the walls as he moves with slow steps deeper into the ruins of his former home. Everything is strewn about chaotically near the door, including the communications unit that Damara had been trying to call him on, but about halfway through the living room, everything shifts to being picturesque, as if there has been no disaster. 

That was one of the things that had unsettled him the most then, but now, if it's possible, it's somehow even more unsettling than it was that day. His boots stop crunching on rubble borne of his former life, and just sound with faint raps against the floor of his lost home, instead.

"Damara?" he asks the darkness. "Dylan? It's- it's me, it's John. It's- dad."

Calling himself 'dad' feels strange; in his own eyes, he'd never been a good father, so he'd never really deserved the title when Dylan had used it. He'd always been afraid to get too close, lest his son end up thinking that Carver was somehow someone to look up to, in all his failures.

"Dad," a voice comes from behind him, and he spins, finding Dylan standing there, gazing up at him, hands at his sides. One of them clutches a tin soldier, the present Carver had sent him, so stupidly, when he was out on a mission once during his son's birthday. He'd never wanted to see him become a soldier like his father.

"Dylan," John says, and lowers himself down, reaching for his son's shoulders. He can't feel them through his gloves, so he strips those off, setting them on the coffee table, and then takes hold of his son again. He's cold, and hard, like stone. Carver jerks back in surprise, but then takes hold of his shoulders again all the same, focusing on who this is.

"You want to play soldier?" Dylan asks, and there's something so innocently haunting about it.

"No," Carver shakes his head. "No, buddy, no more playing soldier. Let's get you out of here, okay?"

"No, John," a voice comes from behind him, and it sounds half like Damara and half not- there's a kind of humming crow to it, like she's not herself entirely. He stands, lifting Dylan in his arms, and refuses to turn to face her as he holds his son close to his chest to try to keep him safe, try to warm him up.

"He's my son," Carver tells the room before him, and he can hear how pitiful he sounds, arguing with the Brethren Moon's manifestation of his wife while he holds a hallucination of his dead boy, but he doesn't care right now, he just wants to try.

"He's ours," Damara corrects him, and he slowly turns around to face her. "But you found someone else, didn't you? Your timer finally stopped. You found... him. The Marker Killer. Instead of me. Of course you'd need someone like him. Of course, I wasn't good enough for you."

From her eyes spill flickering light, at first the static blue of the communicator holograph, the sound of it crackling in his ears as it shines, and then, slowly, colors changing, the harsh red-orange fire of his dementia's hallucinations, growing brighter and brighter as she stalks slowly his way. He stumbles backwards, but her lips part, and from within come harsh whispers, even as she doesn't move her mouth.

"Make us whole," whispers the harsh attempt at a mimicry of her voice, a sound he had always loved turned corrupt.

"We are whole," he protests. "We're a family, Damara, you, me, Dylan." He feels soft like he's not sure he ever has before, feels like the slightest touch could send him falling apart at the joints, a clay man not yet turned hard. He clutches his son closer, but then he can hear the same static whistling from just beside his ear, and he slowly turns his head to look at the small boy there, gazing at him with brilliant blue pouring from his orbs, from his mouth.

"Make us whole, dad," Dylan says in his arms, the lights of his own turning that harsh, flaming crimson as well, and when he tries to look away from his son, he finds that, for all his might, he cannot manage it.

They might not be Necromorphs this time around, but he wishes they were. This would be so much easier if they were... and, of course, the Brethren Moon knows that.

Damara lunges at him, fingers wrapping around his throat, ice cold and solid as it, too. As the light pouring from his family overwhelms him the same way the hallucinations from the Brethren Moon's rise before the Terra Nova did, he screams himself with abandon back into the darkness, then free of it into Isaac's arms.

"John!" the engineer is shouting, his blue-green eyes wide and eyebrows high with some expression of desperation flowering forth of him, and then he's holding him still as he thrashes on the floor in the cockpit of the Terra Nova, nothing to light it in the shadows of empty outer space outside of his hallucinations but the dim consoles... and there's the Brethren Moon, staring down at them. 

Carver imagines that it's laughing at him, and wishes with all the fire spreading from his heart through his gut that he could take his gun, shoot it through the viewfinder at the front of the ship, and watch it crumble like Tau Volantis' did.


	2. Reunion

They sit in the cockpit together for a long time; there are no Necromorphs left aboard the Terra Nova with them, but it's dead in space, the engines blown out after they de-shocked into normal space again, just before the rise of the Brethren Moon. Isaac had been hoping to just coast on momentum through space until EarthGov or someone of their ilk could come pick them up and bring them back to be debriefed, as Carver had assumed they would be as a result of the actions they took on Tau Volantis, but this was clearly not going to be the case.

Instead, they were just another derelict in what would soon become a flotilla of a junkyard above the planet, just like the Sovereign Colonies fleet above the atmosphere of Tau Volantis. Carver didn't want to say so, but he was pretty certain already that they were going to die here, the two of them sitting in the cockpit watching the New Horizons Lunar Colony burn and the Brethren Moon drift just beyond it, watching over Earth like a careful parent as its children fed on her populace. He wished there was something they could do about all of it, but, so far as he could tell, there was nothing but waiting for the headache he's got to develop into Necromorphs taking control over him or something equally horrifying, like what the dementia did to Nolan Stross.

Carver scowls uselessly at the scene of destruction unfolding for millions of miles before them, cursing Danik for what he did to begin all this, his scar tugging tight on the left side of his face. Isaac lays a hand on his shoulder to ease him back from raging at it all, wordless.

Then, the signal comes through, after a number of hours of that certainty sitting heavily in the middle of his chest, Isaac and him sharing warmth by sitting close together on the floor behind the pilot's seat. Carver's throbbing head takes a backseat to the surprise of it all.

"Hello?" comes a familiar, accented voice. "Hello? Can you hear me? Isaac? Carver? Is that you? Come in!"

"Holy shit," Isaac says, eyes widening. He looks to John with a gleam in his blue-green eyes as he plants his hands behind him against the floor, as if expecting to be knocked on his ass by the revelation of the radio's sound.

"That's Langford!" Carver realizes, coming to his feet quickly and leaning over to open a channel to her, hoping against hope that they weren't just experiencing a joint hallucination brought on by their proximity to the omnipresent Brethren Moon. 

"Ellie!" Isaac exclaims. "You're alive!" 

"Only barely," she remarks. "Though I'm more impressed you're alive than I am with myself for flying off when I saw the Necromorphs coming. How did you survive Tau Volantis? I thought for sure destroying the Moon killed you both."

"We almost did," Carver snorts gruffly, "But then we fell planet-side, to the surface, and we found a way to get aboard the Terra Nova. There were some Unitologists left, and some fanatical bastard claiming he was a Prophet, but we made it. Then..."

"Then this," Isaac finishes for him. "Ellie, what's happened? We didn't get here in time to hear anything but... death."

"The Earth Defense Force was already in ruin from the Holy War," Langford reports shakily. "When the Brethren Moon appeared, it was chaos; no one knew what to do. I almost wrecked the Unitologist shuttle, trying to land. Then I saw the Necromorphs. The Moon didn't waste any time making sure we would fall. So I flew off again."

"That's all you know?" Carver asks, and then realizes how that sounds. "I just mean, we're going to need intel if we're going to fight back against the Moons."

"We can't fight back," Ellie declines, "The Brethren Moons rule the galaxy now. Earth and the Lunar Colony are lost. What would we even be fighting for when all hope is lost?"

"All hope isn't lost," Isaac says, after a moment of silence passes between the trio on the radio. "Come pick us up from the Terra Nova, Ellie. I think I have an idea of how we're going to beat these bastards, and get our planet back."

"Let's hope you're right," Ellie sighs. "I'm on my way. Over."

She signs off the radio, and Isaac turns to Carver with a sigh, scrubbing a hand over his face and through his hair as he scowls.

"Did you mean it?" Carver asks. "Do you really have an idea of how to beat them, or was that just bullshit for Langford's sake?" As much as he's ready to hear Isaac is just trying to make his ex-girlfriend feel better about the situation, he's got a kind of secret hope, warm in his chest, that the engineer really does have some outline of a plan for getting them back down shit creek without a paddle.

Isaac gives him a knowing look, probably able to feel, somehow, through their being soulmates, this hope. "I do," he says, "But I'm still working it out. When Ellie gets here, I'll lay it out on our way out of the system. We've got to ShockPoint away from here if we're even going to stand a chance to begin with."

Carver nods, and tries to keep that candle of sorts alive in his chest. If anyone has a chance at figuring out some off-the-wall, flying by the seat of their pants solution to a Necromorph problem this big, after all, it's Isaac Clarke. He doesn't doubt that this guy- his soulmate or not- has the best brain in the galaxy when it comes to taking down the undead bastards that are currently ravaging their home planet, as well as their Markers. It's no mistake that people called him the Marker Killer before all of this new horror got started.

So he follows Clarke, grabbing his Bullpup Rifle from where he left it at the side of the cockpit and walking on the other man's heels towards the docking hatch where Langford flies up sluggishly and connects to the Terra Nova with her stolen Unitologist shuttle. Carver doesn't really understand why running away is the start of their plan, if the Brethren Moons are capable of traveling to Earth as swiftly as they did, but he's glad to try, even if they follow. At least it's a chance at a moment's reprieve from the pounding headache its constant psychic interference and assault is giving him.

Isaac hugs Ellie as soon as the hatch opens, one-armed, plasma cutter dangling from his free hand as he does so. Carver has half a mind to snap at him and tell him to quit doing that, that he'll take off someone's foot holding it so haphazardly, but holds his tongue, knowing that if anyone has the hang of those things perfectly, it's the engineer, after all his days using one in his Marker Killer business on the Ishimura, the Sprawl, and Tau Volantis.

"Carver," Ellie greets him, and he goes to grunt his own response, but then she pulls him in for a hug, too, surprising him. He hugs her back with one arm, gentle and uncertain, but she squeezes him around the neck like they're old friends before separating from him again and stepping back to look between the pair of men. 

"So," Isaac says, somewhat awkwardly, shifting and rubbing the back of his neck with one gloved hand, still dangling his plasma cutter by his side. He presents her with arm, or, more accurately, Carver supposes, his timer, all zeroes, beside his pulse. "Carver and I are soulmates."

"Congratulations," Ellie says dryly, "I knew it wasn't me. Norton was mine, scumbag he turned out to be in the end, what with Danik, or not. But, besides, aren't there bigger concerns right now? Literally, I mean, Moon-sized ones?"

"Right," Isaac nods, and Carver finds himself rolling his eyes, though not entirely meanly, at the engineer's antics. "The plan. Let's get on the shuttle and get on the way out of the system. That thing can still ShockPoint, right?"

"As long as there's a ShockRing active," Ellie confirms. "Let's go, before those damn Moons get any deeper in our heads than they already are." She steps aside, gesturing into the Unitologist shuttle, and Isaac hurries inside. Carver is slower, not entirely thrilled to be stepping into another one of the cult's ships right when he's leaving the terror of the Terra Nova behind. This one has Unitological script around the door, but he does his best to ignore it, and just goes in to sit beside Isaac, who takes his hand into his own abruptly, giving it a squeeze through their gloves. The soldier notices he wants to remove them and just hold hands without anything to divide them, to numb the sensation, but pushes the temptation away. It's not important right now.

Ellie programs the coordinates for the ShockRing and then takes a seat across from them, her eyes flickering to their joined hands for a moment. She gives a tiny smile, lips quirking up at the corners, mostly, and not much more, but then gets right back to business.

"So," she says, "This plan of yours. Out with it, Isaac."

"The Brethren Moons," Isaac starts, a statement of its own that weighs down the atmosphere of their reunion with its being spoken. "They're the source of the Markers, the source of the Necromorphs- somehow. So, if we destroy all of the Brethren Moons, then it stands to reason that we'll have destroyed all of the Necromorphs as well. If we do that, the infestation on Earth will die out, not to mention everywhere else the Moons might have attacked while we were on our way back from Tau Volantis."

"Okay," Langford nods, measured, clearly trying to not immediately shoot down Isaac's plan as the bullshit it kind of seems to be, considering what he's talking about. Carver, on the other hand, has no such qualms about confronting his soulmate with the truth.

"You're saying we need to destroy a bunch of Moons, Isaac?" he asks, "Let me just- you remember these are Moons, right? Let's set aside that they're Necromorphs. How are we going to blow up a bunch of full-size Moons?"

"We killed one already," Isaac reasons. "How hard can it be to kill the rest, if we did that impromptu?"

"We had the help of a dead alien race that numbered in the trillions, if you forgot," Carver says. "Not to mention they were capable of building a machine that could freeze a planet- and a Necromorph infestation- in its tracks. We're not close to that. We're three people who are capable of piecing together a broken ship at best. How's that going to help us kill off an entire set of Brethren Moons?"

"I don't know, okay, John?!" Isaac snaps. "Look, that's my plan. As far as I can tell, it's the only one we've got." He pulls his hand free of Carver's, who immediately feels the loss, and then tosses both of them in the air, exasperated. 

"It's something," Ellie says at last, eyes darting between the two of them. "For now, let's focus on getting out of the system and finding somewhere to recuperate while we work out the kinks. Maybe there's some weapons stashed somewhere that we can use against them. Or maybe we can jury-rig something from one of the- many- derelicts floating in space right now. We'll figure out, okay, guys?"

"Okay," Isaac nods, and pinches the bridge of his nose, sighing as he slumps forward and rests his elbows on his knees.

"Okay," Carver repeats the motion, and stares at his soulmate for a moment before patting his back.

"What?" Isaac asks, sounding somewhere between irritated and surprised.

"It's going to be okay," Carver tells him, trying his best to sound honest. He's never been an optimist, though, and his true conclusion is not nearly as positive:

Right now, hope is looking dim. The Brethren Moons are blacking it out, an eclipse of undead might against the light of the sun. That might, in fact, be more literal than he knows.

Despite this, he's still willing to try.


	3. Derelict

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ((A/N: I don't know much about engineering, so I'm sorry in advance if any little sections regarding it in this story from here on out are wildly inaccurate.))

Isaac dozes off against Carver's shoulder shortly into the flight, and despite his best attempts to stay awake and alert to their surroundings in case of a Brethren Moon following them across the galaxy, the soldier soon follows suit, exhausted to the core of his being after having nothing but the nap on the Terra Nova while they were Shocking back to Earth. It feels like it's been days since he rested, despite that, which might make sense, given the events that have taken place recently.

When they de-Shock into normal space again- or, that is, as normal as space can get, now that the galaxy is under the control of the Brethren Moons- Langford wakes the pair from their slumber, calling out into the back. "Isaac! Carver! Wake up, you've got to come take a look at this!"

Beside John, Clarke groans, clearly wishing he could have slept longer. Somehow, even then, the engineer makes it to his feet before the soldier, and shuffles his way to the cockpit, leaning over the back of Ellie's chair to peer out into the black void beyond the Unitologist shuttle's viewfinder. His shoulders steel a little before he looks back and says, with a glint in his eye, "John, hurry up and come take a look at this. Ellie found us a goddamn gold mine."

A little doubtful that that's an accurate claim, but willing to entertain the thought until he sees for himself, Carver paces to the front of the shuttle, stretching his back and feeling muscles shift and his spine pop faintly before he twists his neck and receives the same. He leans over, and, looking out, finds himself looking at a flotilla of ships hanging in the vacuum beyond, much like the Sovereign Colonies fleet in the upper limits of Tau Volantis' sphere of influence- only these are free floating, no planet close enough by to be having an effect on them. It appears all of them are just frozen in a state of perpetual sluggish motion through the emptiness. 

"Well, I doubted you, but that's certainly something," Carver grunts, patting each of their shoulders before straightening up. "If any of them still work, and have functioning Shock drives, we might have a chance at surviving this shit after all."

"A chance at surviving?" Langford asks, twisting around. "Carver, with that number of ships, we might be able to get enough survivors together to actually mount an offensive against the Brethren Moons. We send a signal out, and see who shows up, that's my plan. Sorry, Isaac. No offense."

"None taken," Isaac shakes his head.

"One problem," John cuts in, "The Brethren Moons are able to communicate over radios, too. They might be able to get in our heads again- or, worse, track us- if we turn on the long range systems to try to get into contact with other survivors; which, I might note, we have no idea how many of there are. We could be three of the last people left alive in the galaxy."

"With the rate that these infections spread, we could be the last three people alive, period," Isaac murmurs, sobering and staring at the floor of the shuttle for a long moment, his shoulders settling lower as the grim realization takes hold. He's seen enough of these things, like Carver, to know that the Necromorphs waste no time at all in decimating populations. It's possible, with the hours that have already passed, that Earth, lacking a Defense Force in the wake of the Holy War with the Unitologists, could be entirely overrun- especially when one considers the influence of the Brethren Moons floating just beyond the Lunar line. 

"Is it possible these ships are infested, too?" Ellie wonders. "We saw on Tau Volantis how long those things can survive, just laying in waiting for someone to come along so they can continue their... assimilation."

"Convergence," Isaac corrects her. "Their goal is Convergence. To create more Brethren Moons out of the remains of every living species until there's nothing left to assimilate anymore. Then, they'll just go dormant and wait until the next species comes around for them to consume. It's a vicious cycle."

"Yeah, but the ships- what about that?" Carver leans over. "I heard that part of what caused the Sprawl infection to spread so quickly was the number of Necromorphs still aboard the Ishimura when it got docked there. If those things just are sitting there in the thousands on these ships, we might be better off waiting to starve in this shuttle."

"We can fight them," Langford disagrees, resolute. "We have before, again and again. We can do it one more time, at least."

"There's no guarantee those ships have munitions onboard," John eyes them.

"Plasma cutters," Isaac brandishes his weapon of choice. "They're industrial, not military. Their munitions are standard issue for most vessels, so I'd assume they'll have them onboard some place or another."

"Scared to use something other than a Bullpup Rifle, Sergeant?" Ellie asks, looking over her shoulder at Carver with a twinkling kind of mischief in her eyes. 

"I'm always ready to learn a new skill," he shrugs. "Especially when it comes to killing the Necromorphs. Count me in."

"Great," Isaac says. "In that case, Ellie, take us in. As soon as we're out, take off again and wait just outside the ship. If we need to evac fast, you'll be our only hope, so we can't all three go aboard."

"Fine," Langford says, "But let the record show that I don't agree with you leaving an extra gun behind to wait in space for the signal."

Isaac doesn't answer that, and Carver's not altogether interested in spending what are potentially his last living moments free of fighting the undead arguing with anyone, so he just keeps his mouth shut on the matter and waits as she takes them in, swooping low towards the docking bay. She uses manual procedures instead of automatic ones, which he admires; he'd always preferred a human touch to trusting some computer to do their job for them... even more so after seeing what had happened when the electromagnetic pulse rippled out of Marker Shroud 4 on Uxor.

The shuttle rumbles as it lands. Ellie grunts to herself and disengages the ramp. As it lowers, Isaac presses his hand on Carver's shoulder and steps in close. 

"Listen," he says, "If there's anyone who can do this, it's us. We've both killed thousands of these bastards at this point. And, now we know we're soulmates. We're in touch with each other. Together, these things can't stop us."

"What if one of the Moons shows up?" Carver asks, ever the cynic.

"We fight it together," Isaac says gruffly. "I'll help you keep it out of your head as long as you help me keep it out of mine."

"Fine," John says, and hefts his rifle. "Ready to go, then, soulmate?"

"Ready," Clarke confirms, and the ramp thumps heavily to the ground of the docking bay. Isaac waves goodbye to Ellie and then they walk in companionable, if tense, silence to the floor and start out through the darkness.

Carver wishes he'd asked Isaac if he knew the way to the bridge on one of these vessels, since it appeared to be a later model of a Planet Cracker like the old first edition Ishimura, but doesn't want to raise his voice now. He has no idea what variation of the undead could be lurking in the shadows, just waiting for them to get distracted before it emerges to tear them apart like every other victim of the Necromorphs. 

Isaac's breath is harsh and metallic, the sound filling the atmosphere of the wide open room; he always seems to be taking in deep rasps of air when they're in a situation like this one, trying to steady himself in the moment even after all the times he's already fought the monsters. Carver supposes he can't blame the guy; it's one thing to be a soldier and be asked to fight a bunch of grotesque freaks, but it's another entirely to be an engineer who's had his brain used as a playmate by those same freaks' masters and forced into the life. 

"Ease up, Isaac," Carver speaks, breaking the silence, gently bumping his shoulder against the other man's. "Nothing's here yet. Let's just get to the concourse so we can find the bridge."

"I know where the bridge is," Isaac answers, clipped, but not rudely. "I can lead us there. I just need you to cover my ass."

"That I can do," John says, and then feels his ears and face grow warm when Isaac turns his head slightly as if to question John's choice of words- he did sound like he was trying to flirt, after all, in the middle of a ship potentially full of the dead and their ilk of sorts. 

"Good to know," Clarke says at last, and John expects him to sound irritated, but he just sounds amused and a little cheeky, instead. There's even something like a smile in his voice, leaving a warm feeling in the soldier's stomach that he finds steadies him in the situation at hand. 

Isaac's breathing levels out, and Carver supposes that maybe it made him feel better, too.

~

The pair reaches the bridge without consequence, the elevators still operational when they reach the spire that leads up to the apex of the ship. As the doors open, the viewfinder at the front reveals the dark void staring back at them, stars twinkling distantly, and planets hovering, small multi-colored dots in the distance. It's all too calm, and sweat prickles on Carver's skin as the hair on the back of his neck stands up straight.

"Stay alert," he murmurs, and Isaac bobs his head in silent agreement, holding out his plasma cutter before himself and shining his flashlight into the dark corners of the bridge as they pace forwards towards the main controls for the Planet Cracker. 

A corpse sits in the seat to the left, but the right one is empty. Carver gestures at the corpse, and Isaac and he fan out to either side; it has no face, and has been thoroughly gutted, the entrails in a mess across the floor in front of the chair as they hang down between the body's legs. It's clearly the work of a Necromorph, if only a single one, and the soldier would put money on it having been the other, missing pilot of the vessel.

"Watch the vents," Isaac rasps. "I'm going to get the ship booted up and see if I can get quarantine protocols running so we can find out where the hell the thing is before Ellie lands again."

"Got it," Carver nods, and turns, taking an account of every entryway into the room and pressing his back to a safe corner so he can keep an eye on all of them in turn. 

Isaac leans over the controls and presses a few keys before uttering a short curse and kneeling to tear off the panels underneath. 

"What's wrong?" Carver asks.

"The controls are shorted out," Isaac explains. "I've got to splice the wires to get them to come back online."

"Just work fast," John suggests, and his soulmate doesn't say anything in reply, just continues rummaging around inside of the machine, head tilted and arm buried in it up to the middle of his bicep. 

After a few minutes of terse quiet, other than the rattle of mechanics, the lights suddenly flicker on, and dust filters in through the vents. The controls all glow dully as Isaac stands and taps a few keys, entering the ship into a quarantine scan for unknown organisms or any otherwise notable anomalies. After a moment, it gives a pleasant little beep.

"What was that?" Carver asks.

"There's nothing onboard," Isaac says, his helmet folding back as if the results will change when he's looking at without the visor in his way. "No sign of any Necromorphs in any of the vents, ducts, rooms, anything..."

"That doesn't make sense," the soldier shakes his head, and folds his own helmet down as he walks over to the controls and brings up the camera feed for the cockpit. It loads up, and a dim blue holo of static transforms into a grainy image of the pilot being mauled by none other than a Slasher Necormorph.

"There was clearly one on board," Isaac murmurs, "So where did it go?"

"Did you scan in here?" Carver asks, turning around to look over his shoulder and getting a tighter hold on his gun.

"I scanned the whole ship, and the hull," Clarke confirms. "It's nowhere. Even if its corpse was here, the scan would have picked it up as something anomalous."

Carver watches the feed again, and squints as, after killing the pilot, the Slasher disappears into the background and scales the wall. He turns and looks at that same wall in the bridge, spying a vent where it must have entered, judging by the off-tan and black gore left on the wall from its traversal.

"Try to follow it with the cameras," he suggests. "Maybe we can figure out where it went that way. It could be in a blind spot for the scanners, or something."

Isaac wordlessly complies, leaning over and running his hands across the keys, switching cameras at breakneck speed to keep up with the Necromorph's scuttling motion through the shafts. When it finally exits them, it disappears into the shadowy murk of the docking bay.

"That doesn't make sense," Clarke shakes his head. "We were just there, and it wasn't."

"Check the cameras while we were in there," Carver says, something twisting in his guts, a painful kind of nerves. It nags at his mind, something just out of reach that he's trying to put his finger on. Where has it gone?

John watches as the cameras show their shuttle land, and then Isaac and himself emerge, walking away from the ship as Isaac tosses a wave back at Langford. The engines flare again to carry the shuttle out, and something blurs across them. 

"Oh, shit," John says in realization, and hails Ellie in a blind panic, eyes widening. "Langford! Langford, pick up!"

"Ellie!" Isaac says loudly, evidently having come to the same realization Carver has- the Necromorph is no longer aboard the Planet Cracker because it's riding the the shuttle they came riding in on, biding its time before it tries to kill Ellie.

"What?" Langford's voice comes over the radio. "Is the ship secure? I'm tired of floating out here."

"There's a Necromorph on the shuttle!" Carver shouts, spittle flying from his mouth.

"What?!" she says loudly, and then there's a screech, and she bellows, "Shit! Shit!"

There's a banging report, like it's grappling with her, and Isaac's eyes go wide as he punches the dash.

"Ellie!" he yells at the top of his lungs. "Ellie, go for the arms!"

A plasma cutter spits on the other line, a static blasting sound, and then there's silence.

"Langford?!" Carver says loudly. "Langford, report! Report, that's an order!"

The shuttle drifts into view outside, and, a moment later, the engines engage and it flies towards the docking bay.

"It's dead," Ellie pants on the other end, and Carver can hear her tapping the controls to land as there's a distant metallic rumble that runs through the ship when the shuttle makes contact. "It's dead."

"How about we never do that again?" Isaac suggests, and Carver feels a laugh bubble up from inside him, all panic and no mirth.

Ellie starts laughing with him, and Isaac just stares between him and the radio in turn, shaking his head. 

"You two are crazier than I am," the engineer decides, so Carver just laughs harder.


End file.
